


A Brief Manifesto From Murray Hill

by stupidbloodyidiots (orphan_account)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Depression, Gen, Post Episode: s07e05 The Angels Take Manhattan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 20:15:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/stupidbloodyidiots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-TATM, undertones of Amy/11 but character-centric. Trigger warnings for depression.</p><p>"Life may be real but stories are true."</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Brief Manifesto From Murray Hill

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly, this is not a Rory or Amy/Rory positive fic. Secondly, it relies on a couple of sources other than the show, namely Amy’s novel Summer Falls and the short feature “P.S.”, but you don’t have to know these things to comprehend it. Thirdly, trigger warning depression! Though this started out as a fic about depression (answering very loosely a prompt from Cate, which was "amy pond deals with being a 21st century woman in an early 20th century world") and became a fic about fighting depression.

The first time she gets sick is May 10th, 1939, a week after  _Melody Malone_ ’s publication.

And it  _is_  an illness, she insists, though Rory in all his unyielding exasperation determines that there isn’t a thing wrong with her, physically. “The drugs you need won’t be invented for another twenty years,” he says. No psychiatrist could properly understand the situation. “There’s nothing you can do.” So when a depression cycles in, the exhausted nausea and the listlessness, Amy does just that: nothing. Sleeps through afternoons, stays indoors. Doesn’t talk to Rory. Doesn’t talk to anyone.

She supposes her husband’s frustration is her fault, because she’s sure if he behaved this way she’d start to resent him too. The space between them grows chilly with the passing months. The novelty of her choice to follow him expires, and like it did a hundred times before, her love falls short. In every film she’s ever seen, the protagonist’s final grand gesture shows us, oh how they’ve changed! Oh how they’ve grown! The problem is resolved – she loved Rory enough to die for him. No denouement could be more resounding. And yet there’s a world after the credits roll, and she really did die for him. She walked into 1938 and she died. New York is an island-shaped coffin.

After the third illness, they say she may lose her job at the publishing house. She doesn’t care all that much until Rory reprimands her, and even then she only cares enough to continue showing up everyday. Despite the commercial success of  _Melody_ , they limit her to reading manuscripts, mostly “ladies literature,” a genre of unsubstantial romance novels marketed to housewives. Her boss calls her  _sweetheart._ She discovered early on that to wear a skirt hitting above the knee is a worse sin in this office than kissing strangers for money ever was in Leadworth. Now she dresses like a matron for work each day, if only to keep the hands off her—though this may be unnecessary, as no one has forgotten what she did to the last male coworker who tried to cop a feel. There was some talk of his pressing charges, but ultimately she’d only gotten a stern talking-to and her wages docked for the week.

And then there is the baby.

“Not for a few years,” she says, when Rory presses her. “Not for a few years. We need to get used to this. We’ll adopt when we’re ready, but not for a few years.” It takes seven before she’s ‘ready’ and he doesn’t let her forget that he’s waited for her, again.

In another day and age Amy Pond might’ve loved New York City, but there are certain people even the brightest world can’t save. She stepped gracefully, even heroically, into being a lost person, leaving her faith in a graveyard sixty years from now. She’d assumed that when she carved the heart out of herself a new one would grow in its place, a thumping red muscle clear of scars, but like many necessities hearts are fixed points, and now she has this hollow in her chest with little to show for it.

Hearts are permanent fixtures. People don’t change. Not Amy, not Rory, not the Doctor. He’s gone. He always comes back, except when he can’t. Or won’t. Or doesn’t.

It’s hard to think that this antiquated echo of an existence was the option marked  _love_ when she made the last choice that meant anything. So she chose love—love over what? Love over faith? There’s nothing more loving than to believe in somebody, especially when they’re not there. But she doesn’t believe in him any more. So she doesn’t have love, or faith. The last time she had a purpose was writing  _Melody Malone_. When she clicked the last letters into place, the adventure ended. She hadn’t known what was on the other side of that afterward, not then. Perhaps there is a sequel in order—she ought to print a correction.  

This is the ironic thought that gives her the very real idea for how she might save herself. She can’t draw because Rory will see, but words can be hers.

“Are you working on a new manuscript?” her husband asks, eyeing the typewriter over her shoulder. She hasn’t moved from her desk in six hours tonight.

“No.”

“So what’s that?”

“I’m just thinking on paper.” He nods and disappears.

The first story she writes is fairly straightforward.

_When I was a little girl, I had an imaginary friend._

She writes and writes and writes. In all her spare time, sometimes at the office once her other tasks are complete. She puts every memory and every palpable absence of a memory down on paper. It takes her months, but she gets to the graveyard.

_“Come along, Pond, please,” said the Doctor._

_The wind whipped my hair into my face. The tears were running sideways across my cheeks. “I’ll be with him like I should be.”_

_“Please,” he cried._

_I had chosen, but there was time._

She stops writing here. It is a Saturday evening. Rory watches telly in the next room. She pulls the penultimate page from the typewriter, sets on the stack with the others, slips the manuscript into a large envelope and then into the desk drawer, which she locks. And she starts the next project.

Each novel is remarkably different from the next, some of them mysteries and many of them adventures, and one romance especially dear to her, for the only constant thread between the stories is herself and the Doctor. He appears sometimes as a friend and sometimes as more and sometimes he’s only mentioned, but she knits him into the fabric of every tale she tells.

He taught her about stories, after all. He taught her the whole universe could be a story in her head. He taught her that stories often espouse the truth with more coherence than the experience of life itself. Life may be real but stories are true; the Doctor taught her this.

It’s homage, that’s what it is. Innocent. Commemorative, like a plaque. So what if the Doctor reappears again and again in the comfort of her fiction? He was her friend. It doesn’t mean anything.  

She signs each story Amelia Williams, because this is legally her name now, but also because Amy Pond didn’t write these novels. Amy Pond is the girl in the stories. She fights dragons and catches killers and woos geniuses. Though her name’s often changed, she lives in manuscript form. Amelia Williams lives in Murray Hill.

“Are you ever going to publish any of it?” Rory asks one day, annoyed. “You spend all that time tapping away, for what?” She frowns curiously at him.

“For me.”

He scoffs. “I just think it’s a bit of a waste, like, you can do it for yourself and still show it to people.” They’re shorter with one another than they used to be. “You never show me your writing.”

She’s at the sink and she passes a sponge across a dirty plate, the suds prickling her fingers. “So?”

“So?” His annoyance always fills the room like some rank odor, and she can feel him glaring though she doesn’t dare look. “I’m your husband.”

She doesn’t answer that, just keeps washing the dishes, her back to him. His footsteps carry him out of the kitchen.  

They adopt their son in 1946. As he learns to read she writes him a children’s book, featuring a feisty, self-sufficient young girl named Kate and an astonishingly friendly stranger named the Curator, and who Kate calls Barnabus. 

For Anthony, who Amy loves and pities, she takes this story from her vault and reads it to him one night, the two of them snug in his little bed.

“I like Barnabus,” Anthony tells her, and she laughs, saying, “Me too.”

Anthony must like the story enough to tell Rory about it, because her husband corners her the next day, pleading with her to present the manuscript at work. At this point she’s moved to a new firm, a better place with a better position. It’s not unlikely that they’d say yes.

She does it for Anthony, mostly. A little bit of legacy for her son. She makes sure all the money goes into a separate fund, which he’ll get when he’s older.

When Rory finally gets to read her writing, she isn’t sure if it’s what he expected or far worse, but either way he’s displeased. She can see it in his face when he comes to sit with her in the parlor, grasping the bound pages with both hands.

For the first minute he doesn’t say anything, only sits there holding her work and staring at its title,  _Summer Falls_ , a furrow in his brow.

Finally, he says, “The Curator.”

Of course. She smiles. “The Curator.”

“It’s him.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?” he echoes incredulously. “You think that’s a good idea? To put him in a story for our son? After the way it affected you when you were a kid, having all those ideas about him.”

Amy stares at the man she, in a very different time, married. The rift between them shows itself to her, she sees their oppositions in plainer colors than before, and while she doesn’t feel moved enough to do anything about it—this is her life, now, this cycle of stories and depressions, as much a part of her as the TARDIS once was—she feels lighter for knowing who her husband is, finally. “He was real, Rory,” she says quietly.

He shakes his head. “He’s not anymore. It’s not like he’s going to come back and show Anthony Pluto.”

Amy shuts her eyes and thinks of her garden with the shed. Though she’s trapped in this eerie place she knows that shed exists somewhere, and that’s all it takes. A kernel of possibility. “I’d never deprive him of believing.”

“As long as he knows it’s a story,” Rory says, getting up to leave.

“Yes.” She looks at the clock on the mantle, clicking into fifteen years. “I think that’s sort of the point.” 


End file.
